110 REVIEWS Re Making

Louis Dudek and Michael Gnarowski, eds. The Making of Modern Poetry in Canada: Essential Commentary on Poetry in English. Kingston and Montreal: McGill-Queen’s UP, 2017. xliii + 340pp.

The implicit question to be answered by any book review is, “did it have to be published?” In the retrospect of fifty years, few works of scholarship will stand the interrogation. In the case of this reprinting of a 1967 compilation by and Michael Gnarowski of “essential articles on contemporary in English”—the original subtitle—the answer cannot be straightforward. The original publication was a milestone in the emergence of Canadian modernist criticism. Without it, progress in that field would have been slowed and differently apportioned. It needed to be published then, and the book needs to this day to be widely available to students of , although it is now itself a historical document rather than an innovative or even accurate accounting of our poetry’s documentary history. The problem is, it is widely available, in a large number of North American university libraries across Canada and the United States, and no doubt in hundreds of public libraries not as amenable to quick online survey. As the present re-release is only very slightly altered from the original publication, its chief merit will lie in its new availability as an e-book. While The Making deserves the new readers who might be drawn to that format, there is no work for the reviewer in noticing the mere fact. Instead, the time seems ripe for a retrospective comment on The Making in its original form, preserved intact here, and for brief reflection on new short texts by Michael Gnarowski and Collett Tracey serving to bookend in this re- release the preserved pages of the original Ryerson book. Critics of my generation might have shared the excitement with which I discovered the book’s contents during graduate studies supervised by Dudek at McGill University in the early 1980s. Dudek did not send me to the book as to some bible; in fact I don’t recall him recommending the book at all, a reticence which was typical of his self-effacing attitude to his own critical works. It was here that I first encountered A.J.M. Smith’s early essays and their tantalizing reference, at the end of “Contemporary Poetry,” to the “Aesthetes,” and it was here that I first read of the tensions between Preview and little magazines. A discussion 111 opened before me in this book’s pages that I have been trying to join ever since, and it’s impossible to imagine what my thinking or pursuits might have been if the book had not been made. To this day, when so much energy is spent making the literary record available digitally, few of this book’s contents can be found online. Of course that makes a strong argument for the book’s digitization by McGill-Queen’s: every curious student of Canadian literature needs to encounter The Making of Modern Poetry in Canada. Though it is not promoted as a fiftieth anniversary edition, fifty years have indeed passed since the book’s publication by the Ryerson Press. That includes fifty years of scholarship on Canadian modernist poetry, of course, much of which has served to wear down and in some cases to leave obsolete the narratives that The Making wished to impose on Canadian literary history. Professor Gnarowski’s decision (or the press’s?) to make no alterations whatsoever to the original book, which runs perfectly and even quaintly intact here from page xliii to page 303, in luminously clear replications of the original pages, was the editorial decision of moment in this new reprinting. Gnarowski notes with pride the “special care” that was “taken not to disturb the integrity of the page order and citations” (xii). To that preserved core he adds a brief editor’s note, a “Personal Essai in the Unwritten History of Modern Canadian Poetry,” and three appendices, while Professor Collett Tracey contributes a short foreword that states The Making’s wide and persistent influence. I’ll say more of these new materials later, for they will have to stand as the chief justification for the book’s reprinting. This is not to minimize the persistent value of the original section headnotes: large portions of these are durable scholarship, and if their narratives are now familiar to specialists they remain welcoming and exciting to new readers of Canadian modernist poetry. They have, inevitably, their dated arguments: A.J.M. Smith’s division of Canadian poetry into “cosmopolitan” and “native” schools in The Book of Canadian Poetry in 1943 is too audible behind the closing lines of the headnote to chapter VI, “Points of View” (156). There are occasional acts of misreading, too, as when Lorne Pierce’s quite subtle demand for “profound and courageous reasoning and selection” in Canadian cosmopolitan responses to the international arts is reduced by the editors to an attitude that simply “turns its face against vigorous currents of influence from abroad” (113-14). None of these minor faults makes me hesitate to send students to the headnotes, the virtues of which are elsewhere so apparent and relevant. Consider the facility with which the 112 headnote to “New Critical Currents” casts light on three persistent issues for today’s scholars: the relation between politics and poetry in the forties, the upsurge in poets following academic careers, and the ambiguous place of E.J. Pratt in relation to (85). Equally striking is the headnote to the sub-section “Poetry Finds a Public,” with an insightful rendition of the transition at mid-century from a “minority culture of embattled intellectuals” to a younger generation ready to exploit new media in the wider dissemination of their works and, increasingly, of their public personas. Although I go on now to chart the book’s inadequacies for the present-day reader, there is no doubt of The Making’s value as an “essential” document in the history of our criticism. The original Making fulfilled an agenda that is all the clearer now that it is presented to us as an historical artefact, with a faux-Art Deco font and stark colouration defining the nostalgically designed cover. As a first observation, the misogyny of that agenda was severe even for the times in which it was compiled. The representation of women’s voices in the volume is astonishingly slight: P.K. Page’s outraged letter of eight lines to the editors of following the controversy over John’s Sutherland brutal review of Robert Finch’s Poems and an outstanding piece of Globe and Mail literary journalism by Joan Finnigan (six pages) make up the whole of it. We hear Dorothy Livesay’s punchy critical voice nowhere (though we do hear her praised by Desmond Pacey in 1954 for the “more specifically feminine” qualities of her “later poetry” [164]), nor those of Anne Marriott, Miriam Waddington, Phyllis Webb, and Jay Macpherson. With the work of Marilyn Rose, Di Brandt, Barbara Godard, Candida Rifkind, Dean Irvine and others having made so plain the crucial roles fulfilled by women in Canadian modernism’s emergence and consolidation, it is self-evident that The Making could not be newly published in this form today. One defence Gnarowski lays down for his having left the original selection intact is that “The documents of their time remain the documents of their time” (xi), but that sword cuts both ways if a publication seeks relevance and a press seeks sales in our time. The deeper agenda of The Making may be less immediately visible to many of today’s readers. This was the editors’ determination to present a narrative and documentary record of Canadian poetic history that privileged the lineage descending from the Montreal little magazine First Statement, through its editors, contributors, commentators, and heirs, at the expense of other literary institutions of the period, including rival little magazines such as Preview and literary movements and tastes with which Dudek differed, such as the Montreal poets of the twenties and thirties 113 and the mythopoeic impulse of poetry in the 1950s. Despite Gnarowski’s recalling in the “personal essai” that he and Dudek “recognized very quickly that there would be competing elements and competing points of view” in the book (xviii), The Making in fact embraces little dissent.1 The triumph of First Statement is pursued on two tacks: first, the selection of documents foregrounds wherever possible the works of Dudek, , and Raymond Souster, the First Statement cohort, whether as authors of criticism and polemic or as subjects of criticism by others; and second, that same selection enshrines John Sutherland, First Statement’s editor, as the titan of modernist poetry in Canada, even though Dudek had broken with Sutherland in the course of the 1950s over the latter’s increasingly conservative cultural politics. In the literary history The Making sought to shape, the fate of those who in one way or another opposed First Statement and its projects is relegation to the second tier of modernist significance. Smith and F.R. Scott are almost wholly sequestered in an early subsection called “The Initiators,” in company with “The Precursors” (Arthur Stringer, John Murray Gibbon, and Frank Oliver Call), in a chapter entitled “The Beginnings of the Modern School.” These titles clearly stamp Smith and Scott with tentativeness and an inability to carry the modernist project past the initiatory stages. The four documents they are allowed to contribute here total eleven pages, with Leo Kennedy’s important Canadian Mercury article “The Future of Canadian Literature” granted a further four. For a telling comparison, the next document in the book, John Sutherland’s raucous introduction to Other Canadians in 1946, is included in full and takes up fifteen pages, as much as all the “initiators” combined. The editors’ clear valuation of these respective works is not significantly offset by their decision to include Smith’s ringing “Rejected Preface [to New Provinces],” one of the most important manifestos of Canadian modernism, among that poet’s “initiatory” pronouncements. The rival little magazine to First Statement in Montreal, Preview, edited collectively by , P.K. Page, F.R. Scott, and others, receives equally grudging notice. Only two of the dozens of essays, reviews, political articles, and aesthetic discussions published in Preview were judged to be worthy of inclusion, and notably neither is by Page or Anderson, though they were clearly the major new poets on whose works the little magazine’s posterity largely rests, along with the expansion of Scott’s vision and practice beyond the Imagism of his McGill Fortnightly Review apprenticeship and the plainness of his 1930s satire. The now famous “Statement” prefacing Preview 1, in which Anderson declared the 114

“newsletter’s” anti-fascist convictions and modernist aesthetics, was ignored. Scott’s “A Note on Canadian War Poetry” from Preview 9 and fellow editor Neufville Shaw’s “The Maple Leaf Is Dying” (Preview 17), a tart review of Smith’s Book of Canadian Poetry of 1943, receive between them seven pages of space. The “New Critical Currents” sub- section’s headnote does not situate Preview as a major contributor to Canadian modernist poetry’s dissemination, nor does it define the stark binary oppositions between Preview and First Statement that constrained and thinned later criticism. (Note nevertheless that Preview enters The Making here for its criticism and not for its manifestoes or polemics.) Those binaries would wait for articulation until the seventh chapter, on “The Little Magazines.” In his essay “The Role of Little Magazines in Canada” Dudek had first set down the antithesis of Preview and First Statement that would later be codified by Wynne Francis in her article “Montreal Poets of the Forties” in Canadian Literature in 1962. Nothing elsewhere in The Making challenges his loaded diction that characterizes Preview as, variously, “mellifluous and hyper-eloquent [...] exclusive […and] derivative” in its “esoteric unawareness of the need for local literary stimulus, for variety, for native expression” (208-9), while the poetry of First Statement was “rough and crude [...] more visceral, their convictions hotter and more truly expressive of the pressures of life” (209). Gnarowski’s essay “The Role of ‘Little Magazines’ in the Development of Poetry in English in Montreal” (1963) deepens the opposition and makes Dudek’s negative judgments explicit: he opines that “the poets of First Statement, young, gauche and raw as they were, were obviously destined for the greater achievement” (220). With the hindsight of 2019 making clear the supremacy of Preview’s P.K. Page among that generation of poets, Gnarowski’s and Dudek’s loaded claims for First Statement accomplishment and condescension to Preview are badly dated.2 This is not to say that the Dudek and Gnarowski retrospectives on “the little magazines” should have been dropped from a revised edition, but it does suggest the need in 2019 for a new editorial apparatus that would foreground the historical contexts and interests of the book’s selections and judgments and point the reader to important documents that were set aside at the time. It is surely for similar reasons that we hear so little of the mythopoeic drift of poetry in the 1950s, which is presented through Frye’s theorizing in The Educated Imagination and two brief editorial prefaces by James Reaney and Eli Mandel (to the first issue of Alphabet and to Poetry 62 respectively). Reaney and Jay Macpherson are mentioned in passing in a 115 later headnote as an “antithetical development”—i.e., a weaker alternative—to “the stronger and freer modes of expression” developed by “the movement of the 1940s and 50s” (271). Perhaps the Montreal- Toronto rivalry and the significant participation by women poets in the mythopoeic redirection of Canadian poetry in that decade played some role here. Dudek clearly wanted The Making to indicate that he, Layton, and Souster were the important new voices of the fifties. The chapter entitled “Resurgence”—a claimed renewal in the 1950s following conservative “retrenchment” after the Second World War—includes Dudek’s essay “Où sont les jeunes?” and all three prefaces from Cerberus, the three-man collection of 1952, in which Dudek, Layton, and Souster asserted their canonical importance. The claimed risorgimento is rather undermined by the section’s other two pieces, Earle Birney’s letter of resignation from the editorship of the Canadian Poetry Magazine and a fittingly harsh review from Civ/n of the ultra-conservative Rhodenizer and Pierce anthology Canadian Poetry in English. Clearly, any resurgence depended on the First Statement trio’s arrival.3 Dudek had broken sharply with Layton by the time The Making was in preparation, so the book’s strong situation of the latter in the canon is a sign of the former’s fair-mindedness, or his accurate assessment of Layton’s genius, or Gnarowski’s intervention in Layton’s favour, or the over-riding value of First Statement credentials in the editors’ apportionment of space for one’s writings. All together, Dudek, Layton, and Souster either wrote or were the sole subject of thirteen of the fifty- five “essential articles.” Collett Tracey refers briefly in her “Foreword” to “the collection of articles [the editors] chose to gather, and the strategic way in which they ordered them [...]” (xiii), and it is this strategic aspect of The Making of Modern Poetry in Canada that the foregoing remarks mean to illuminate. Now, it is not at all surprising to find a poet-scholar such as Dudek furthering his own and his friends’ significance in a piece of nominally objective editorial scholarship. Such favouring of an inner circle is practically the raison d’être of modernist publications, whether these were little magazines such as the McGill Fortnightly Review or little anthologies, such as Des Imagistes and New Provinces: Poems of Several Authors. And Dudek’s individual contributions to the book were of high value: all but one should be widely available. The weakest is certainly “Patterns of Recent Canadian Poetry” (1958). In a typical bit of polemic Dudek interweaves passages of Smith’s, Scott’s, and James Wreford’s poetry with Layton’s, Souster’s, and his own, to evidence his claim that “It was not until Layton appeared, and Souster [...] and myself, that what 116 was ‘political’ before became truly Canadian and realistic modern poetry [...]”. Following the quotations he writes, with an abashment more truly reflecting his private personality, “I hope that I am not setting up, for the wrong motives, what is by chance the poetry of my friends (and my own) as deserving of special attention” (278-9, emphasis added). This defensive and more objective moment, so very rare in The Making, tells us something important about the conflicted and interested motives that drove its selections.4 The volume’s adulatory situation of John Sutherland is its second means of elevating First Statement, its press, and its editor to the summit of Canadian modernist achievement. The book’s dedication was originally to “the memory of John Sutherland” alone, and Gnarowski has elegantly extended the gesture to Dudek as well. I’ve already noted in the selections the elbow room given to Sutherland’s introduction to Other Canadians relative to the scanty space accorded such “initiators” as Smith and Scott. Immediately following that introduction is Sutherland’s brief to the Royal Commission on National Development in the Arts, Letters, and Sciences, the Massey Commission, which takes up fourteen pages of The Making in an extended argument—made implicitly to the reader as well—for the continued importance and worthiness of funding of the First Statement Press and of Northern Review. A candid and critical literary obituary of Sutherland by Robert Weaver in Tamarack Review follows (and offers a more balanced judgment of Sutherland’s failings and his virtues than the book as a whole provides).5 As a result, thirty-six consecutive early pages of The Making gave voice and eminence to Sutherland. His nasty review of Finch is included thereafter, for having occasioned the recriminatory split in the editorial board of Northern Review that followed its publication, a split that began the process of Sutherland’s almost complete isolation within the literary community. Sutherland’s 1951 article “The Past Decade in Canadian Poetry” is the last item from his pen in The Making; it is situated as one “sign of reaction” in the post-war period, alongside prefatory materials by Lorne Pierce and the splenetic anti-modernist V.B. Rhodenizer to the 1954 anthology Canadian Poetry in English. But consignment to a seat among the conservatives does not sideline Sutherland entirely: as the invaluable new index shows, he is mentioned in subsequent articles at least fifteen times, in favourable and at times encomiastic tones. In a final honorific touch Gnarowski has now added an appendix nominally on Other Canadians which, while it has little new to add to the book’s ample depiction of Sutherland, rightly apologizes for the editors’ neglect of 117

Raymond Knister’s work on behalf of Canadian modernism in the 1920s and underscores, by reference to Sutherland’s sister Betty Sutherland, the key roles played by female visual artists in the Canadian modernist project. Long years of research by Barbara Godard, Cynthia Messenger, and Michele Rackham Hall in that area more than confirm his point. The lines along which The Making of Modern Poetry in Canada might be revised and updated for the present reissue by McGill-Queen’s are thus quite clear. A reduction of the First Statement line of development (by cutting Sutherland’s “The Past Decade in Canadian Poetry,” Dudek’s “Patterns of Recent Canadian Poetry,” Robert Fulford on Raymond Souster, and so on) could be accompanied by the dismissal of Rhodenizer’s “Introduction to Canadian Poetry in English” and by the withdrawal of the section on “Relations with French Writing in Canada,” badly dated despite its opening up of a subject that obviously requires its own compendium and history. The range of The Making was such that the untouched remainder would be a book of durable significance and ongoing usefulness today. To have made available in a single volume Smith’s “Wanted: Canadian Criticism” and “Rejected Preface,” Frye’s review of Smith’s Book of Canadian Poetry and Sutherland’s riposte to that anthology in his “Introduction to Other Canadians,” Dudek’s “Academic Literature” and Layton’s “Foreword to A Red Carpet for the Sun,” William Carlos Williams’s “Note on Layton” and Joan Finnigan’s “Canadian Poetry Finds Its Voice in a Golden Age”—with her unique awareness of the interaction of Canadian poetry in the post-war period and the newer media of radio and television—was historic editorial work. Were these now supplemented with, to name only a few possibilities, Livesay’s “Decadence in Modern Poetry” of 1936, the opening “Statement” from Preview 1, the pivotal exchanges between Smith and his interlocutors over the poet’s ideal audience at the Canadian Writers’ Conference in Kingston in July 1955 (Writing in Canada 13-24, 41-9) and his 1961 essay “Eclectic Detachment: Aspects of Identity in Canadian Poetry,” Leonard Cohen’s “Loneliness and History,” Page’s “Questions and Images” (1969), and Webb’s “The Question as an Instrument of Torture” of 1971, we would begin to glimpse a Making for 2019 that honoured the original publication while extending its range for a new generation of readers.6 Lacking such an update, the particular value of this reprinting must lie with its digital edition and with the new materials Gnarowski and Collett have contributed. The newly supplied index has proven its value again and again as I prepared these remarks. The three appendices are of less 118 certain value. The first offers an edition of an early draft of Smith’s “Rejected Preface” with the claim that its variants from the final version are substantive and make clear Smith’s anti-capitalist stance in the 1930s; however, the well-known version in Canadian Literature in 1965 includes the clear-sighted line, “Capitalism can hardly be expected to survive the cataclysm its most interested adherents are blindly steering towards [...]” (41), so the poet’s politics were already plain enough in the version we had to hand. Gnarowski’s prefatory remarks dwell not on Smith’s revisions, which are in any case very slight, but on the publication history of and models for New Provinces, and readers new to the little anthology will value these. The third appendix—the second on Sutherland’s Other Canadians having been noted earlier—comments on the audiences for poetry in the years up to The Making’s publication, with a smattering of summary remarks about the literary cultures of the late 1950s and 1960s and a closing riposte to “hedgehog critics” (they are also “learned foxes”) for ignoring “a cohort of major Jewish writers (Abraham Klein, Irving Layton, Mordecai Richler, and Leonard Cohen)” (320). Gnarowski surely knows that Layton and Richler gave rise to substantial bodies of criticism before their decline and present-day neglect, while Klein and Cohen are at the centre of two of the major current industries of Canadian modernist criticism. Students will not go to these Appendices, then, for any sense of the current field, but rather for the pleasing anecdotal musings of one of Canadian modernist poetry’s major early critics. Gnarowski’s “Personal Essai” that opens the reprinted Making offers a history of the book’s preparation, with pleasing glimpses of his admired friend Dudek (such as the revelation in the fourth footnote that Dudek played the guitar, a fact I’d not known despite forty years of working with Dudek or with his works) and a surprising history of the Canada Council funding of the book. The essai is also intellectual autobiography, and it aspires as well to a broader history of Canadian modernism’s emergence. The reverence for Sutherland in The Making as a whole was clearly not Dudek’s alone: Gnarowski mentions Sutherland’s demand for a North American idiom and identity for Canadian poetry thrice (xviii, xx, xxiii). Some other claims are similarly dissonant with recent critical trends. My arguments in The Montreal Forties for a more nuanced and less polarized relation between Preview and First Statement were clearly not persuasive to Gnarowski,7 and he insists as he might have fifty years ago that the distinction of generations in Canadian modernist poetry—Smith / Scott / Kennedy versus Layton / Dudek / Klein—was that of “the middle-class 119 genteel on the one hand and the bare-knuckled proletarianism of the other” group (xxiii), a class- and ethnic binary evinced in the poetry as “literary aestheticism versus a kind of mordant realism” (xxiv). Such claims cannot help us make sense today of, for instance, Kennedy’s working-class background or Marxism, Dudek’s own aestheticism, or Smith’s passionate anti-capitalism, all ripe and even urgent subjects for critical inquiry. A curious trend in the essai’s discourse is a tendency to lapse into the language of the anthologist of poetry itself: he says that the editors’ goal was “to discover [...] the character of true modernism in Canadian poetry” (xx), while they “also had to come to terms with the natural realism of Canada” (xxi). This rhetorical strain culminates in the inclusion of a curious anecdote about Earle Birney, who thought his contribution underplayed in The Making: the editors took him “out to a nice lunch at a French bistro on Crescent Street and suggest[ed] gently that while ‘David,’ among other poems, was a powerful piece of poetry it was [...] not, in our opinion, a groundbreaking example of modernism.” One imagines Birney’s resentment was not much mollified. When Gnarowski proudly concludes that “Dudek and I, in advancing our thesis, had unseated Scott and Smith as the first and foremost modernists in Canadian poetry” (xxiv), we know that he means that Smith and Scott could no longer be seen as the only leaders of the modernist project, but the unfortunate sentence implies instead their direct displacement by Dudek and Gnarowski, now “leading modernists” themselves. The fact is that none of the four is among the “leading modernists” we recognize today in P.K. Page and A.M. Klein—which is no more than a way of reminding ourselves that The Making of Modern Poetry in Canada was, and remains, a book of its time. If enough specialists have been longing to own their own copy of The Making, the book will be a minor success for McGill-Queen’s; but if enough of those same specialists already own their own treasured and dog-eared copy, or are satisfied by library access to the book, then it is hard to understand the press’s decision to publish the hard copy. The publication is redolent with Gnarowski’s fond admiration for his collaborator Dudek and the strength of feeling with which he misses those days of what may have been their most intense partnership, and for the present reviewer that is a shared pleasure, as is seeing it available for purchase once more. But contemporary readers of Canadian modernism will want to know before buying that any new material in the present republication is entirely of a piece, in its critical and historical 120 sensibilities, with the contents of the ground-breaking volume that appeared, and directed the discipline, fifty years ago.

Notes

1 The 1967 preface acknowledged that “the arrangement and presentation of the material in the chapter introductions imposes some interpretation on the part of the editors” (v), an important but passing moment of candour in its editorial rhetoric. 2 Predictions of future canonicity are rarely a risk worth taking. A remarkable experience of reading The Making today is encountering critical assessments of a given writer’s excellence and certainty of future recognition and realizing that one has never heard his or her name before. Jean-Charles Bonenfant, in “L’influence de la littérature canadienne-anglaise au Canada français” (1956) ranks novelists Jeanne Beattie, W.S. Hardy, John Cornish, and Grace Irwin alongside Hugh MacLennan and Morley Callaghan (262-3). Raymond Souster, in his “About This Book,” the preface to New Wave Canada, has us on the lookout for William Hawkins, Scott Davis, and E. Lakshmi Gill (301). Apologies to the writers in question if it is only the reviewer’s ignorance that makes these names entirely unfamiliar. 3 Similarly, when “Poetry Finds a Public” in the first sub-section of chapter VIII (“Wider Horizons”), it does so in William Carlos Williams’s celebration of Layton, and in two articles on Souster in Time and Maclean’s. Joan Finnigan’s excellent contribution to this section ends by situating Canadian Forum and Dudek’s one-man little magazine Delta as “in a class by themselves”; Dudek is here appraised as “one of Canada’s best-known poets” (240). Just one “anonymous” article on Al Purdy in Time breaks the First Statement group’s monopoly on the rise to public attention of Canadian poets. 4 As I will later suggest that this essay might be dropped in a revised future edition, it’s important to note here one of its (and the book’s) strongest moments, a paragraph of remarkably prescient cultural comment that would be a significant loss to the volume as a whole were my suggestion followed: “For the young poets beginning to write today, the political ideals of the forties poets have been destroyed in the holocaust of World War II, and what was left of that politics was finally discredited in the emergence of an Organization society based on militarism and efficiency, a society which is accelerating its regulatory and standardizing techniques everywhere around us. ‘Socialism’—or the Welfare State—has vanished as an ideal before the reality of mass communications systems serving the New State and the centralized corporations, while an abundance-consumption culture tries to absorb the goods poured out by accelerated and overexpanded industry. [...] Military budgets of astronomical proportions are now a regulatory means (controlled waste) of keeping the machines whirring at maximum speed, while only the threat of a devastating war guarantees an unquestioning credulity in the populace, a passivity in the well-informed. Advertising has brainwashed the public intelligence and drained the entertainments almost entirely of the genuine arts. [...] The future looks even more ominous: societies—soviet or capitalist—will be more ‘cybernetic’ than ever, more mechanically efficient, dehumanized, and unreal, than anything we have dreamed; the free individual, the artist, if he exists, will be a secret misfit, a demented servant, working against the speedy senseless drive and fury of machines” (282-3). 121

5 Desmond Pacey also tells the story of Sutherland’s contribution with justice and objectivity in “English-Canadian Poetry, 1944-1954,” in the chapter entitled “Points of View”: see pp. 161-2. 6 A late section on “Modernism in Retrospect” might usefully include such rich documents as Webb’s “On the Line” of 1981 and Miriam Waddington’s “Apartment Seven” (1989), works which might otherwise be considered too late—or too anticipatory of post-modernism—for inclusion in a new Making. 7 “Preview, with the hesitancy that this word implied, was not the assertive and self- affirming First Statement that moved out of its origins as a ragged, mimeographed, hand-stapled sheaf into a printed little magazine” (“Personal Essai” xxiii). Had Preview’s first-issue “Statement” been included in the book it would have been impossible to suggest that assertiveness and self-affirmation were the exclusive ethos of the First Statement cadre.

Brian Trehearne